Ten Years at SeaA Maritime Celebration of Cornwall

Introduction

Keynote lecture transcripts

Biographies

Editorial extracts

Curator of Imperia l & Marit ime HistoryJohn McAleer

A Li fe UnderwayPhil ip Rentall

Origins of the Modern Racing DinghyTim Bass

Rowing the At lant icPhil Pring

John McAleer

Phi l ip Rental l

Tim Bass

Phi l Pr ing

The Old Man and the SeaErnest Hemingway

Full CircleEllen MacArthur

Close to the WindPete Goss

A Voyage for MadmenPeter Nichols

Moby DickHerman Melville

Voyages of a Simple SailorRoger Taylor

The Long WayBernard Moitessier

Over the TopAdrian Flanagan

20,000 Leagues Under the SeaJules Verne

Maiden VoyageTania Aebi

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‘My character and good name are in my own keeping. Life with disgrace is dreadful. A glorious death is to be envied.’ Lord Nelson

Curator of Imperial & Maritime History

John McAleer

My PhD thesis focused on the representation of landscape, exploration and empire in 18th- & early-19th-century southern Africa. Following the completion of my doctorate, I developed interests in Atlantic history, focusing on the slave trade, abolition, and British missionary and military involvement in the Caribbean and Canada. Recently, I have been working on military and scientific networks in Britain’s Indian Ocean World. I am also co-editing a collection of essays on the subject of Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience.

My research focuses on the British encounter and engagement with the wider world in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Specific areas of interest include:• The British presence in the southern Atlantic and Indian Oceans, especially the Cape of Good Hope and St Helena• Slave trades, slavery and their suppression

• British naval, military and missionary activity in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean• The Royal Navy and empire• The public recognition and commemoration of British naval and military figures and campaigns• Museums, collecting and their relationship to empire

Selected publicationsBooks• Representing Africa: Landscape, Exploration and Empire in Southern Africa, 1780–1870 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010)• (With H. V. Bowen and Robert J. Blyth), Monsoon Traders: the Maritime World of the East India Company (London: Scala, 2011)

Edited collections• (Edited with Sarah Longair), Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012)

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‘Knowledge of the oceans is more than a matter of curiosity. Our very survival may hinge upon it.’ President John F. Kennedy, Jr.

The Old Man & the Sea

Ernest Hemingway

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled; it look like a flag of permanent defeat.

He was asleep in a short time and he dreamed of Africa when he was a boy and the long golden beaches and the white beaches, so white they hurt your eyes, and the high capes and the great brown mountains. He lived along that coast now every night and in his dreams he heard the

surf roar and saw the native boats come riding through it. He smelled the tar and oakum of the deck as he slept and he smelled the smell of Africa that the land breeze brought at morning.

Usually when he smelled the land breeze he woke up and dressed to go and wake the boy. But tonight the smell of the land breeze came very early and he knew it was to early in his dream and went on dreaming to see the white peaks of the Islands rising from the sea and then he dreamed of the different harbours and roadsteads of the Canary Islands.

He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and of the lions on thebeach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his trousers and put

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them on. He urinated outside the shack and then went up the road to wake the boy. He was shivering with the morning cold. But he knew he would shiver himself warm and that soon he would be rowing.

The door of the house where the boy lived was unlocked and he opened it and walked in quietly with his bare feet. The boy was asleep on a cot in the first room and the old man could see him clearly with the light that came in from the dying moon. He took hold of one foot gently and held it until the boy woke and turned and looked at him. The old man nodded and the boy took his trousers from the chair by the bed and, sitting on the bed, pulled them on.

The old man went out the door and the boy came after him. He was sleepy and the “.old man put his arm across his shoulders and said, “I am sorry

“Qua Va” the boy said. “Its is what a man must do.” They walked down the road to the old man’s shack and all along the road, in the dark, barefoot men were moving, carrying the masts of their boats.

When they reached the old man’s shack the boy took the rolls of line in the basket and the harpoon and gaff and the old man carried the mast with the furled sail on his .shoulder.

“Do you want coffee?” the boy asked

“We’ll put the gear in the boat and then get some”

They had coffee from condensed milk cans at an early morning place that served fishermen.

How did you sleep old man?” the boy asked. He was waking up now although it was stil l hard for him to leave his sleep.”

“Very well, Manolin,” the old man said. “I feel confident today”

“So do I,” the boy said. “Now I must get your sardines and mine and your fresh baits.

“He brings our gear himself. He never wants anyone to carry anything.”

“We’re different,” the old man said. “I let you carry things when you were five years old”

I know it,” the boy said. “I’ l l be right back. Have another coffee. We have credit here.”

He walked off, bare-footed on the coral rocks, to the ice house where the baits were stored.

The old man drank his coffee slowly. It wasall he would have all day and ne knew that he should take it. For a long time now eating had bored him and never carried a lunch. He had a bottle of water in the bow of the skiff and that was all he needed for the day.

‘But he knew he would shiver himself warm and that soon he would be rowing.’

The boy was back now with the sardines and the two baits wrapped in a newspaper and they went down the trail to the skiff, feeling the pebbled sand under their feet, and .lifted the skiff and slid her into the water.”

“Good luck old man.”

Good luck, the old man said. He fitted the rope lashings of the oars onto the whole pins and, leaning forward against the thrust of the blades in the water, he began to row out of the habour in the dark. There were other boats from the other beaches going out to sea and the old man heard the dip and push of their oars even though he could not see them now the moon was below the hills.

Sometimes someone would speak in a boat. But most of the boats were silent except for the dip of the oars. They spread apart after they were out of the mouth of the harbour and each one headed for the part of the ocean where he hope to find fish. The old man knew he was going far out and left the smell of the land behind and rowed out into the clean early morning smell of the ocean. He saw the phosphrescence of the Gulf weed in the water as he rowed over the part of the ocean that the fishermen called the great well because there was a sudden deep of seven hundred fathoms where all sorts of fish congregated because of the swirl the current made against the steep walls of the floor of the ocean. Here there were concentrations of shrimp and bait fish and sometimes schools of squid in the deepest holes and these rose close to the surface at night where all the wandering fish fed on them.

In the dark the old man could feel the

morning coming and as he rowed he heard the trembling sound as flying fish left the water and the hissing that their stiff set wings made as they soared away in the darkness. He was very fond of flying fishas they were his principal friends on the ocean. He was sorry for the birds, especially the small delicate dark terns that were always flying and looking and almost never finding, and he, thought the birds have a harder life than we do except for the robber birds and the heavy strong ones. Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel? She is king and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and sich birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea.

He always thought of the sea as la mar which is what people call her Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman. Smoe of the younger fishermen, those who used buoys as floats for their l ines and had motorboats, bought when the shark livers had brought much money, spoke of her as el mar which is masculine. They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even a enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favours, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.

He was rowing steadily and it was no effort for him since he kept well within his speed and the surface of the ocean was flat except for the occasional swirls of the current. He was letting the current do a third of the work and as it started to be light he saw he was already further out than

he had hoped to be at this hour.

I worked the deep wells for a week and did nothing, he thought. Today I’l l work out where the schools of bonito and albacore are and maybe there will be a big one with them.

Before it was really light he had his baits out and was drifting with the current. One bait was down forty fathoms.

The second was at seventy-five and the third and fourth were down in the blue water at one hundred and one hundred and twenty-five fathoms. Each bait hung head down with the shank of the hook inside the bait fish. tied and sewed solid and all the projecting part of the hook, the curve and the point, was covered with fresh sardines. Each sardine was hooked through both eyes so that they made a half-garland on the projecting steel. There was no part of the hook that a great fish could feel which was not sweet smelling and good tasting.

The boy had given him two fresh small tunas, or albacores, which hung on the two deepest lines like plummets and, on the others, he had a big blue runner and a yellow jack that had been used before; but they were in good condition stil l and had the excellent sardines to give them scent and attractiveness. Each line, as thick around as a big pencil, was looped onto a green-sapped stick so that any pull or touch on the bait would make the stick dip and each line had two forty-fathom coils which could be made fast to the other spare coils so that, if it were nescessary, a fish could take out over three hundred fathoms of line.

Now the man watched the dip of the three sticks over the side of the skiff and rowed gently to keep the lines straight up and down and at their proper depths. It was

quite light and any moment now the sun would rise.

The sun rose thinly from the sea and the old man could see the other boats, low on the water and well in toward the shore, spread out across the current. Then the sun was brighter and the glare came on the water and then, as it rose clear, the flat sea sent it back at his eyes so that it hurt sharply and he rowed without loojing into it. He looked down into the water and watched the lines that went straight down into the dark of the water. He kept them straighter than anyone did, so that at each level in the darkness of the stream there would be bait waiting exactly where he wished it to be for any fish that swam there. Others let the, drift with the current and sometimes they were at sixty fathoms when the fishermen thought they were at a hundred.

But, he thought, I keep them with precision. Only I have no luck any more. But who knows? May be today. Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.

The sun was two hours higher now and it did not hurt his eyes so much to look into the east. There were only three boats in sight now and they showed very low and far inshore.

All my life the early sun has hurt my eyes, he thought. Yet they are stil l good. In the evening I can look straight into it without getting the blackness. It has more force in the evening too. But in the morning it is painful. Just then he saw a man-of-war bird with his long black wings circling in the sky ahead of him. He made a quick drop, slanting down on his back-swept wings,

and then circled again.“He’s got something,” the old man said aloud “He’s not just looking.”He rowed slowly and steadily towardswhere the bird was circling. He did not hurry and he kept his lines straight up and down. But he crowded the current a little so that he was stil l fishing correctly though faster that he would have fished if he was not trying to use the bird.

The bird went higher in the air and circled again, his wings motionless. Then he dove suddenly and the old man saw flying fish spurt out of the water and sail desperately over the surface.

“Dolphin,” the old man said aloud. “Big dolphin.”

He shipped his oars and brought a small l ine from under the bow. It had a wire

leader and a medium-sized hook and he baited it with one of the sardines. He let it go over the side and then made it fast to a ring bolt in the stern. Then he baited another line and left it coiled in the shade of the bow. He went back to rowing and to watching the long-winged black bird who wasworking, now, low over the water.

As he watched the bird dipped again slanting his wings for the dive and then swinging them wildly and ineffectually as he followed the flying fish. The old man could see the slight bulge in the water below the flight of the fish and would be in the water, driving at speed, when the fish dropped. It

is a big school of dolphin, he tought. They are widespread and the flying fish have little chance. The bird has no chance. The flying fish are too big for him and they go too fast.

He watched the flying fish burst out again and again and the ineffectual movements of the bird. That school has gotten away from me, he thought. They are moving out to fast and too far. But perhaps I will pick upa stray and perhaps my big fish is around them. My big fish must be somewhere.The cloud over the land now rose like mountains and the coast was only a long green line with the gray blue hills behind it.

The water was a dark blue now, so dark that it was almost purple. As he looked down into it he saw the red sifting of the plankton in the dark water and the strangelight the sun made now. He watched his lines to see them go straight down out of

sight into the water and he was happy to see so much plankton because it meant fish. The strange light the sun made in the water, now that the sun was high, meantgood weather and so did the shape of the clouds over the land. But the bird was almost out of sight now and nothing showed on the surface of the water but some, patches of yellow, sun-bleached Sargasso weed and the purple, formalized, iridescent gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war floating dose beside the boat. It turned on its side and then righted itself. It floated cheerfully as a bubble with its long deadly purple fi laments trail ing a yard behind it in the water.

‘He looked down into the water and watched the lines that went straight down into the dark of the water.’

‘Eventually man, too, found his way back to the sea. Standing on its shores, he must have looked out upon it with wonder and curiosity, compounded with an unconscious recognition of his lineage.’ Rachel Carson

‘Something must be left to chance; nothing is sure in a sea fight above all.’ Lord Nelson

‘We can only sense that in the deep and turbulent recesses of the sea are hidden mysteries far greater that any we have solved.’ Rachel Carson

‘We know what the surface of the moon is better than we know what the surface of the sea floor is.’ M. Barber

‘...those who have once listened to the siren songs of the ocean bed never return to land.’ Phillip Diole

‘Instead of gazing down through water buckets and glass-bottomed boats, in addition to watching the fish milling about in aquariums, get a helmet andmake all the shallows of the world your own.’ William Beebe

National Maritime Museum CornwallDiscovery Quay Falmouth Cornwall TR11 3QQ

01326 313 388 enquiries@nmmc.co.uk